SENKYO 2

Senkyo (2007) followed the rickety campaign of Yamauchi, an inexperienced candidate parachuted into Kawasaki by the Japanese Liberal-Democrat party. Since then in Theatre, Kazuhiro Soda gave an oblique portrait of a Japanese playwright and theatre director, and his conception of an “observational film”: a cinema so direct that it captures all the theatricality of daily life and its quintessential fiction. “You create nothing, you’re only recording my natural behaviour!” protests a politician in Senkyo 2, unaware that he is providing the filmmaker with a documentary treatise. But this new portrait of Yamauchi, who sets out again on a 2011 campaign, unfolds in a very different context. Scarred by the very recent accident at Fukushima (250 km away), he is now an independent candidate. Outraged by the authorities’ mismanagement and encouraged by the success of Senkyo, this Capra-style Mr Smith fights alone against the nuclear industry. Although his campaign, in a car without loudspeakers and no handshaking sessions, delights us with its slapstick side, the film also shows that it displays an insolent luxury – the luxury of independence, a notion that challenges the very depths of Japanese culture. (Charlotte Garson)